Popular Festivals

Album number three from New Yorkers Cymbals Eat Guitars sees the band dispensing with complex, clever rock in favour of more accessible songs that deliver all of your basic emotional staples in one convenient nine-song package: tender balladry, falsetto euphoria, bitter angst, thwarted loss and befuddled bewilderment.

‘LOSE’ is a eulogy, an epitaph, a lurching collection for an impromptu wake, full of disbelief, shock and wistful recollection. The arrangements here are critical, covering everything from string-soaked outpourings on ‘Child Bride’ to feisty, crushing thrash on ‘Warning’ (listen below) and ‘XR’.

It’s all over the place stylistically, but then no one ever said that feelings had to make sense.